Fences and Retaining Walls, is a practical manual for the fencing professional and has all the information for quality fence work. An important book as well for house builders and home remodelers.

Fences and Retaining Walls, is a practical manual for the fencing professional and has all the information for quality fence work. An important book as well for house builders and home remodelers.

Whether it is for aesthetics, security, or simple privacy, no project is more important to a landscape than its vertical boundary structures—the fences, walls, screens, and retaining wall terraces. This book includes classic favorites, like picket fences and panel fences, but also includes interesting regional variations, like Virginia split rail fences and dry-fit stone garden walls. Also included here are the latest materials, such as new variations on PVC vinyl and polymer-coated, wrought-iron look-alikes. And special attention is given to decorative boundary walls for patios—the latest trend in today’s cutting-edge landscape architecture. Add in major hardscape retaining wall terraces, and even an invisible electronic dog-fence project, and you have the most complete and modern book on fences and garden walls available.

Gray rock fences built of ancient limestone are hallmarks of Kentucky's Bluegrass landscape. Why did Kentucky farmers turn to rock as fence-building material when most had earlier used hardwood rails? Who were the masons responsible for Kentucky's lovely rock fences and what are the different rock forms used in this region? In this generously illustrated book, Carolyn Murray-Wooley and Karl Raitz address those questions and explore the background of Kentucky's rock fences, the talent and skill of the fence masons, and the Irish and Scottish models they followed in their work. They also correct inaccurate popular perceptions about the fences and use census data and archival documents to identify the fence masons and where they worked. As the book reveals, the earliest settlers in Kentucky built dry-laid fences around eighteenth-century farmsteads, cemeteries, and mills. Fence building increased dramatically during the nineteenth century so that by the 1880s rock fences lined most roads, bounded pastures and farmyards throughout the Bluegrass. Farmers also built or commissioned rock fences in New England, the Nashville Basin, and the Texas hill country, but the Bluegrass may have had the most extensive collection of quarried rock fences in North America. This is the first book-length study on any American fence type. Filled with detailed fence descriptions, an extensive list of masons' names, drawings, photographs, and a helpful glossary, it will appeal to folklorists, historians, geographers, architects, landscape architects, and masons, as well as general readers intrigued by Kentucky's rock fences.

Whether it is for aesthetics, security, or simple privacy, no project is more important to a landscape than its vertical boundary structures—the fences, walls, screens, and retaining wall terraces. This book includes classic favorites, like picket fences and panel fences, but also includes interesting regional variations, like Virginia split rail fences and dry-fit stone garden walls. Also included here are the latest materials, such as new variations on PVC vinyl and polymer-coated, wrought-iron look-alikes. And special attention is given to decorative boundary walls for patios—the latest trend in today’s cutting-edge landscape architecture. Add in major hardscape retaining wall terraces, and even an invisible electronic dog-fence project, and you have the most complete and modern book on fences and garden walls available.

There once may have been 250,000 miles of stone walls in America's Northeast, stretching farther than the distance to the moon. They took three billion man-hours to build. And even though most are crumbling today, they contain a magnificent scientific and cultural story-about the geothermal forces that formed their stones, the tectonic movements that brought them to the surface, the glacial tide that broke them apart, the earth that held them for so long, and about the humans who built them. Stone walls layer time like Russian dolls, their smallest elements reflecting the longest spans, and Thorson urges us to study them, for each stone has its own story. Linking geological history to the early American experience, Stone by Stone presents a fascinating picture of the land the Pilgrims settled, allowing us to see and understand it with new eyes.